


Tragic Love Stories

by websters_lieb



Series: Are We Falling Together or Falling Apart [2]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: M/M, Reflection, Second Person, post 5x12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 00:32:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3830569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websters_lieb/pseuds/websters_lieb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t know why you’re here.</p><p>It’s dark out, late enough that even the streets of Chicago are silent, and you’re standing directly in front of the Milkovich house.</p><p>You haven’t seen Mickey in weeks - or is it months now? The days had blended together into a conglomeration of nothingness, of feeling like someone had sucked all of the energy out of you and filled your bones with lead so that you couldn’t bare to move. You had been low, and then you got high. That’s what they said. Your family. They say you’re low again, even though you’re taking the meds now, and maybe you are, but it doesn’t quite feel like that to you, not now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tragic Love Stories

You don’t know why you’re here.

It’s dark out, late enough that even the streets of Chicago are silent, and you’re standing directly in front of the Milkovich house.

You haven’t seen Mickey in weeks - or is it months now? The days had blended together into a conglomeration of nothingness, of feeling like someone had sucked all of the energy out of you and filled your bones with lead so that you couldn’t bare to move. You had been low, and then you got high. That’s what they said. Your family. They say you’re low again, even though you’re taking the meds now, and maybe you are, but it doesn’t quite feel like that to you, not now.

You haven’t been doing this long enough to really be able to tell the difference between being low and just being upset, but you _think_ this has nothing to do with your brain chemistry and everything to do with Mickey. When you were low you would sleep for days, refuse to move, but for the past few day’s you’ve been more jittery than comatose, and now here you are, in front of Mickey’s house in the dead of night, your gaze glued to the front door.

You’re standing just outside the gate, not daring to pass it. You don’t remember why you had gone for a walk in the first place, but you know you hadn’t meant to come here. Or at least you think you didn’t, you can’t definitively say anything about your own mind anymore. Either way, here you are.

You want to walk up to the door, open it, go to Mickey’s room - what used to be your and Mickey’s room - and climb into bed with him. You want to dip your head into the curve between his neck and his shoulder and tell him you missed him. You want to hear him grumble - half asleep - and pull you closer. You want to erase the past six months and return to that moment of happiness you had over the summer. You wan’t to go back in time.

It’s not an uncommon feeling nowadays. You long for a past version of yourself, for the you who had been so determined to go to West Point, for the you who didn’t need meds to not go postal, for the you who could drink a beer and not have to worry about how it would affect your carefully balanced cocktail of prescriptions. But now you don’t long for yourself, you long for Mickey. You long for when Mickey was with you, those tiny moments of perfection that were so separate from everything else in your life. You want to kiss him, to feel him against you, to have him in the same fucking room as you, you want to run your fingers through his hair, you want to breath in his smell, you want to see his stupid shirts with the sleeves cut off, you want all of the things that you had taken for grated before.

Your feet feel like they’re cemented to the ground, and maybe that’s a good thing, because otherwise you might actually do what you’ve been desperate for, you might open that door and go to Mickey, and you can’t do that because you can’t face Mickey, you can’t look at him and know that you can’t have him. You just can’t.

Missing Mickey isn’t a new emotion. You’ve perfected the way you get on without him, you’ve spent months upon months worrying about him while he was in juvie, you’ve spent weeks watching him fall apart before he got married. You know how to be happy without him, which scares you because it shouldn’t be true, you love him so much that you think that your days should be bleak without him in them, but honestly you know that that’s not true. You can fuck around with older guys, you can have fun, you can still be you. It makes you feel dirty.

You used to tell yourself that you shouldn’t have to sit around moping about him, that he didn’t care about you anyway so what the fuck was the point in being sad all the time for someone who could never love you - at least not the way you wanted, the way you needed. But now you know differently. Now you know for certain that Mickey cares, that Mickey always cared, and now it really is your fault that he’s gone. It’s all your fault and you fucking _know_ it.

You told him to go. You told him it was over. You told him that he didn’t owe you anything. You watched you’re crazy sort-of sister chase him away with a gun. You watched him leave and you did nothing. These things are true, you know that logically, but you can’t accept them. You can’t accept the fact that you let something so good slip through your fingers so fast. You can’t accept the fact that Mickey told you that he loved you for the first time and you didn’t say it back. You’ve thought out a thousand different ways that you could have replied differently, that you could have clarified what you meant, that you could have not fucked everything up so much, but no matter what you hope for, the past remains resolutely the same.

A light flickers inside the house and you stop breathing, being as silent as possible as a figure moves around, their shadows dancing across the window shades. You wish for it to be Mickey - just for a second. You wish that he would look out the window and see you, like in all the cheesy rom coms you’ve seen with Fiona, but the light goes off and the street remains silent, because this isn’t a movie, and you don’t get to have your happily ever after.

Your love was always more of a tragedy anyway.

It’s time to leave, you know that if you stand here any longer then you’re going to break, that you’re going to end up sobbing your fucking eyes out in front of your ex-boyfriend’s house, so you turn away. You rest your hand on the metal fence for a second, closing your eyes and taking a deep breath. You start to walk away and it feels like you’re heart is caught in your throat, like there are a thousand strings yanking you back in the opposite direction, and you have to fight against them. As you get farther away, the strings feel like their snapping, making your steps come easier, but you wish them back, because as each thread breaks you can feel pieces of you flying away with them until everything that you shared with Mickey is gone.

You want to cry, you can feel the heat welling behind your eyes, but no tears come. You feel your phone vibrate in your pocket and you pull it out. You have a text from Lip. _Coming home soon?_ It’s an innocent few words, but you know that there’s more behind it. It’s Lip’s way of checking to see if you’re manic, if you’re off doing drugs and fuck knows what else and ruining your life all over again. You type a quick reply - _yeah_ \- but it feels like your lying. You haven’t felt at home in the Gallagher house for a long time, and you know why. Lip would say that you were being stupid, but you think of Mickey, of the broken threads, of all the things that you had said, and you know better.

You don’t have a home anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently I write fics at one in the morning a lot now. It's becoming a thing. Thank you for reading.
> 
> Come say hi at mickeyswaitingforme.tumblr.com


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